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QUILL PENS
date to the Dark Ages, when bird feathers replaced the hollow reeds the Romans
used. To make a quill pen, you first had to catch your bird. Goose feathers
were favored. Swan quills were the best, but who would approach an angry swan?
Crow feathers, it is said, were unbeatable for drawing fine lines.

Thomas
Jefferson bred special geese to keep himself in writing implements. Because of
their shape, only the five feathers at the tip of the left wing would
do—left-handers could use feathers from the right wing—and it was
best to pull them in the spring. The trick then was to bury the feathers in
hot, dry sand to harden the points, after which it was time to get your penknife
out: the better the cut, the finer the script.

After a
couple of ink-spattered pages, it was time to retrim the nib. If you were
lucky, your quill might last a week. Small wonder Britain imported twenty-seven
million quills a year from Russia alone.

For almost
1,500 years, people used quill pens to write letters. By the middle of the
nineteenth century, however, steel nibs were well on their way to ousting the
trusty quill.

Then, in the twentieth, along came the
fountain pen, the ball point, the fiberpoint, the roller ball, the gel-point.